There are some popular phrases that just grate on my nerves. You find them everywhere, especially when people are speaking on TV. They are just filler, often not serving any real function, and almost always they can be eliminated with any loss of clarity.
Here is an example that I found in a recent post by PZ Myers where he quoted the CEO of some video company saying the following:
“We’ve been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that’s something we’re looking to change going forward.
I think going forward, we’ll see that we’ve got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”
Notice that in the short space, she used the phrase ‘going forward’ three times. I do not want to be too harsh in my criticism because she was making a speech. When one is speaking extemporaneously, it is hard to avoid using cliches and I too have done so. As George Orwell wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language:
When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
I too when speaking in public and making an argument on the fly, have sometimes found myself unable to find the right way to bring the thought to a satisfactory end and so insert some filler, kicking myself while doing so.
But if the above speaker was reading from a prepared speech, then that is less excusable. When writing, one has to be ruthless in editing out redundancies such as these and carefully choose words to fit the point one is trying to make.. But that requires some time and attention to detail on the author’s part and, as Orwell says, it appears that some are unwilling to make that extra effort.
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
Orwell says that he is not advocating some kind of language orthodoxy.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a “standard English” which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a “good prose style.” On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.[My italics-MS]
In writing these blog posts, I have some point that I wish to make but do not have the luxury to edit multiple times. It is when the writing comes most easily, when the words just flow out, that I have to be most vigilant, because that may mean that I am too receptive to ready-made phrases (like ‘going forward’) and have surrendered to them.
Not a problem: looking around, it seems we’re going backward -- in every direction at once.
Since we’re on the topic of phrases that grate, one for me is “… changed his life forever.” No, the only thing that changes your life ‘forever’ is death. What they usually mean is “… changed his life drastically.”
In the internet era, the greatest danger I face is altering a few words and forgetting to alter the rest of the paragraph around it in a suitable way, resulting in duplications and other relics of earlier versions. When using pen and paper, you had plenty of time to perceive necessary alterations.
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BTW in the era of Word version # One Million there should be some function that highlights repetitive use of words and/or phrases to help the writer spot the sort of thing Mano mentions.
We must move forwards, not backwards! Upwards, not forwards!
The cliché that really gets my goat these days is “individual(s)” used in contexts where “person,” “someone,” or “people” would have worked just fine. Like, I’m hearing people dropping “I was talking to an individual the other day, and…” in totally casual conversations, and to me it sounds really ridiculous. Why couldn’t you just say you were talking to “someone”?
That, and, “gentleman” used to refer to any man who is most certainly not. As in “an unhinged gentleman was stalking me outside the grocery store.” Doesn’t sound like much of a gentleman to me.
I hadn’t thought much about “going forward” but now that you’ve mentioned it here, I’m going to start hearing it everywhere and it’ll probably start annoying me, too.
“You want to be able to give that kind of stability […] but I think that’s a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.”
i take this as they don’t care about stability. workers are cogs that can be replaced, to make more money for the company.
@birgerjohansson,
i hear there is this new fangle AI stuff that ought to be able to highlight repetitive phrases…
though your prose will have six fingers…
“Learnings” is a very recent word I’d like to see disappear. “Lesson” is right there, feeling neglected, and “learning point” is patiently standing by for anyone who is thinking of enumerating a few small ones.
( I know, get off my lawn and all that. ).
” and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you”
Orwell is quilty of inventing the LLMs.
“gift” is a noun, not a verb.
That part of the Orwell quotes seems the most relevant to me. Her message is bad. She’s partially admitting that but clearly not too comfortable with it. So whether consciously or not, she’s obfuscating the meaning.
A recent post on FT Alphaville: Companies would like you to know they are doing things on purpose, which is about the current fad for the phrase “with intention” in corporate communications. For example:
(That’s from a Chipotle earnings call.)
As they put it:
My personal bugaboo for some time now is a single word: “unprecedented”. It’s a perfectly decent word, nothing wrong with it at all, it just seems like people used it far too much (you might say “an unprecedented amount”) during the pandemic, and they’ve never really stopped since -- and often for things that are in no way actually unprecedented.
lanir @ 11
On a (somewhat) positive side, obfuscation has always been an important alternative use for language.
That, and marking status by using a different choice of words than the unwashed plebeians.
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As for clarity… yeah, big chunks of written texts, especially in administration are technically “communicating” something, but it is a bit like the labyrinth of the minotaur, the creator was not interested in helping you.
A gold star to writers who actually make the effort.
@Dunc: I think I still prefer overuse of “unprecedented” rather than overuse of “redemption story”. A lot of people sounded like mediocre sports casters for a while desperately trying to appear relevant. The phrase was mangled to the point it could be applied to any vaguely positive turn for anyone or anything.
As long as we’re having fun ranting about linguistic irritants, can I point out the ridiculous use of the word “perfect” these days? I swear it is the most over- and mis-used word in the English language today. Just count to yourself how often someone responds to you with the word, “perfect” in daily interactions (LOL with “individuals”).
I finally had enough one day some time ago when I was paying for a purchase for say $17.79. I handed the sales clerk a 20 spot and they said, “perfect.” I responded that “No, if I had given you $17.79, that would have been perfect.” The guy looked at me like this was some kind of new concept that needed to be processed before it made any sense to him.
Thanks for your post Mano and the responses, good to get this off my chest!
frankensteen,
I too have noticed the proliferation of the word ‘perfect’, in contexts where ‘thanks’ would have been appropriate.
This is a perfect article, unprecedented in its composition. The individual who wrote this deserves congratulations. Going forward, I hope there’s more.
Trickster Goddess @2 I feel that way about people saying they will ‘remember this moment forever’ or ‘I’ll remember this until I die’. In the first case my immediate thought is ‘no you won’t’, in the second ‘unless you get one of the many dementias’, so far I’ve managed to restrain myself from saying either.
I think it was George Bernard Shaw who apologised to a correspondent for sending them a long letter, along the lines of ‘sorry for the length of this letter I didn’t have time to write a short one’.
Jazzlet @ # 18 -- I don’t have time to look it up either, but I’ve seen that one attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
“purposely”
ARGGHH *HULK SMASH*!!!
NO, it’s “on purpose”, or “deliberately”.
My God, how I would give serious money for that one to vanish from our discourse.
— — — — — — — — — — —
And, possibly more enraging to me:
“on accident”
NUKE THAT PERSON FROM SPACE!!!
Yeah, it’s “BY accident”. As I’m pretty certain everyone would know. You wouldn’t say the opposite as, “by purpose” would you? No? Use the correct preposition, FFS.
*sigh*
Pierce #19 and Jazzlet #18: I can be bothered to look it up. The first time it was used was reportedly by Blaise Pascal in 1657: Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
This thread has deteriorated* into an old folks’ venting session. Count me in! I despise it when some (USAnians?) use “momentarily” when they mean “imminently”. And don’t get me started on “the door wants closed”…
*please, please don’t use “evolved”